[The register is NOW available here and there’ll be a prize for anyone who reads the blogpost below, with a runner-up prize for anyone who finishes this sentence, before clicking on the link!]

On days like today, you might even feel like being forgiving of the former Fianna Fail housing minister Michael Finneran who repeatedly* parroted the same excuse in 2010 for not delivering a House Price Database when he used the Data Protection Act as a defence though he assured us the matter was being progressed by his Department and it was in the coalition Fianna Fail/Greens Programme For Government.

But junior minister Michael Finneran was just the latest in a long line of government politicians of every colour to promise to introduce a transparent price register and then fail to deliver once they were in power. Even this current government’s Minister for Justice Equality and Defence Alan Shatter has taken 19 months to get to the stage that today, we have at last the register that was recommended by Judge Kenny at the start of the 1970s.

Thank you IMF.

* Unfortunately as a result of recent IT changes on the Oireachtas website, links to Minister Finneran’s responses to parliamentary questions no longer work on the HPD blogpost which has tracked government progress in implementing the register. But this response in May 2010 is nearly identical to what were probably scores of similar questions in 2010 “The Department has held meetings with a broad range of interested parties to gather views on the shape that such a register might take. This range of interested parties includes the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Central Statistics Office, Institute of Auctioneers and Valuers of Ireland, Property Registration Authority, National Property Regulatory Services Authority and the Department of F nance. Once the work of this group has concluded, recommendations will be made to Government. The timing of the establishment of the register will be determined by a range of factors including the possible need to amend the Data Protection Acts to allow for achieved sales prices to be published”

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Looked up “Sandywell” the new dojo of “Bonnie and Clyde” no 410,000 sale in Lucan this year ?
But may require the house number,did ticketmaster design the site,what’s with having type in extra “words”.
Hyper link to Apple maps,ok Google maps would have been useful.

Just a very quick, shallow, review of the area around me showed the following. Larger more expensive house were selling for 15% to 20% less than asking prices. The smaller more entry-level type of house sold for slightly more than asking.

@Sean, from about May 2012 onwards I can see some fairly startling prices. Unfortunately the PSRA seems to be making it deliberately hard to access large volumes of data. There are likely to be 20-30,000 transactions from January 2010 onwards but even that could be accommodated in a simple downloadable spreadsheet, this is not after all sophisticated data.

They could really do with a field/flag identifying multi-unit transactions. There are some very obvious outliers at the top end where whole estates look like they are being sold. It is harder to identify these further down the price ranking.

Also they should have consolidated the Irish and English property size and property description fields.

Perused an area I am very familiar with and see that a house just two doors away from one I sold in 2004 dropped exactly 50% when sold in 2012. This example and others I am very familiar with suggest to me that there are further falls to come. I see prices returning to those obtaining around 2000 (at the most optimistic) over the next few years – if not indeed reaching 1998 levels. If I am correct, I see another 25% fall in the coming few years. Of course if we default and exit the Euro all bets are off and values will fall even lower.

Thanks to the Troika we now have this register and it is one of the reasons I favour much longer term involvement of outside agencies in the running of our economy. To hell with sovereignty I say! All it has done since 1922 is lead to high emigration and social stagnation at home. Emigration has been the safety valve that prevents reform at home. Anything that takes power away from the Dail is welcome in my view. I have a benign view of the Troika: they’ve hardly come here to steal our women or our Daniel O’Donnell records.

As I live in Limerick, I must take a look at two of these.
I like the Fedamore one for €125Million. Fedamore is somewhere close to Ballybrickin and Caherelly, not that easily found, with due respect to all Fedamorians.
It must be a hell of a pad